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SUMMARY: The book is a collection of papers presented at a workshop on Argument Structure held at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in 1998. The researchers draw evidence from a number of languages in support of either one of two hypotheses: children learn their mother tongue by observing the linguistic environment of verbs (syntactic bootstrapping, Gleitman 1990) or by fitting words into semantic scenarios (semantic bootstrapping, Pinker 1984). The volume can be of interest to specialists in first language acquisition, relational and universal grammarians and to language typologists and people interested in lesser-known languages.

The articles have been grouped in three sections. The first section, entitled ''Verb Meanings and Verb Syntax: Crosslinguistic Puzzles for Language Learners'', addresses the issue of whether verbs systematically appear in syntactic environments which reveal their meaning and whether the semantic 'make-up' of verbs conforms to the respective universal frames.

In her chapter, entitled ''A Person, a Place or a Thing? Whorfian Consequences of Syntactic Bootstrapping in Mopan Maya'' (pp 29-49), Eve Danziger shows that in Mopan Maya verb-like meanings, such as 'jump' and 'run', act as nouns, thus obliterating the presumed universal distinction between nouns and verbs. In spite of this fact, Danziger maps the structure of the language into learning mechanisms which make it possible for children to learn the meanings through the syntactic environments in which they occur. Thus the author endorses syntactic bootstrapping at the expense of the noun/verb distinction which, in her opinion, needs to be reconsidered.

In chapter 3, ''The Pitfalls of Getting from Here to There: Bootstrapping the Syntax and Semantics of Motion Event Coding in Yukatek Maya'' (pp 49-69), Jurgen Bohnemeyer discusses the fact that in Yukatek verbs expressing motion take arguments which convey 'referential ground' - an argument type alien to motion verbs in most European languages. He argues that children could not possibly tune in to this way of framing motion unless they examine the morphosyntactic properties of the verbs, which, in effect, discards semantic bootstrapping as the explanation of language acquisition. However, the frequency of arguments denoting 'referential ground' is not as high as expected in naturally occurring speech and Bohnemeyer concludes that semantic and syntactic bootstrapping work in tandem, facilitating and complementing each other in a dialectic relationship.

In the next chapter, ''Making Sense of Complex Verbs: On the Semantics and Argument Structure of Closed Class Verbs and Coverbs in Jaminjung'' (pp 69-89), Eva Schultze-Berndt reaches the same conclusion exploring co-verbs in Jaminjung, an Australian Aboriginal language. Verbal meanings tend to be expressed by a set of simple verbs which take a number of structures modifying the basic meanings. Exploring the nature of these co-verbs, the researcher shows that children can learn their meaning neither from the complex syntactic environments, nor from a semantic frame. Syntax and semantics should function in tandem. Schultze-Berndt is also led to believe that similar real-world scenes can not be described by verbs with a common argument structure in different languages.

In chapter 5, entitled ''Figure-Ground Indeterminacy in Descriptions of Spatial Relations: A Construction Grammar Account'' (pp 89-111), Sotaro Kita tackles the problem that some languages allow saying both 'the skewer pierced the meat' and '*the meat pierced the skewer', which feature he calls 'figure-ground indeterminacy'. On the basis of Japanese, English and Likpe, he concludes that Figure-Ground indeterminacy occurs with different verbs in different languages, moreover pragmatic reasons can lead to various uses of the same verb. Therefore, children need to learn to constrain the use of a verb on the basis of their experience, without an inherent syntactic or semantic rule to guide their choices. Kita admits that little research is available into this area of language acquisition, and into this aspect of verb argument structure.

In her chapter, entitled ''Learning Verbs without Boots and Straps? The Problem of 'Give' in Saliba'' (pp 111-141), Anna Margetts points to data from Saliba, a Western Oceanic language, which she thinks are suitable for constructing a test for the syntactic and semantic bootstrapping hypotheses. In Saliba, two verbs express meanings associated with 'give': one is used for the first and second person, the other for the third person. The latter satisfies the Universal Grammar claim that such verbs take three arguments: a giver, a given object and a recipient, but the former occurs only with an object given. The type of acquisition mistakes can provide evidence whether children learn the verbs proceeding from a semantic frame or from the arguments appearing with the verb. So far, learning Saliba has not been sufficiently researched to yield data for the test, but still Margett's material delivers a severe blow to the assumption that a universal alignment between event types and syntactic structures exists.

The second section of the book is entitled ''Particpants Present and Absent: Argument Ellipsis and Verb Learning'' and the chapters present research how children learn verb meanings when in speech the arguments are often omitted in the surface structure.

In chapter 7, ''Same Argument Structure, Different Meanings: Learning 'Put' and 'Look' in Arrernte'' (pp 141-167), David Wilkins tests the hypothesis that 'put' and 'look' belong to different semantic classes and should thereby appear in different syntactic frames. Material from Arrernte, an Australian Aboriginal language, shows that both are in fact three-place verbs, contrary to the syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis. The analysis of corpora leads Wilkins to hypothesize that children do not automatically take the appearance of arguments as an indication that the verbs belong to a specific semantic class with its respective argument structure. Alignments between a syntactic frame and a semantic meaning can be more or less natural and children tend to base their decisions on more natural alignments rather than on less natural ones. Chapter 8, ''Verb Specificity and Argument Realization in Tzeltal Child Language'' (pp167 -191), presents Penelope Brown's study of semantically complex verbs in Tzeltal, a Mayan language. The data challenge the view that nouns are easier to learn than verbs in first language acquisition. Because children tend to learn Tzeltal verbs first, as carriers of a greater amount of semantic information, Brown endorses what is known as language-typology bootstrapping (Slobin 2001): the organization of a language determines which structures are acquired first. However, in her opinion, the specialization occurs at later stages of language learning: initially, words are learned as syntactic frames around a semantic core. Brown also observes that the direct objects of verbs incorporating the meaning of the respective objects ('eat crunchy food') are realized less frequently by both adults and children than the direct objects of verbs with more general meanings ('eat no matter what'). Therefore, patterns of argument ellipsis are related to the semantics of a verb by a link that is possibly inherent for the learners.

In the final chapter of the second part, ''Interacting Pragmatic Influences on Children's Argument Realization'' (pp 191-213), Shanley Allen addresses the issue of which discourse-pragmatic factors are taken into consideration by children when they learn to drop verb arguments. Based on corpora from Inuktitut and Korean, the researcher explores factors such as newness, contrast, absence and person. Allen collates her data with other investigations and concludes that children are most sensitive to the informativeness factors. Also, factors function cumulatively to impact overt argument realization.

The third part of the book, ''Transitivity, Intransitivity, and their Associated Meanings: A Complex Work-Space for Learnability'', contains diverse articles on transitivity and intransitivity.

If Perlmutter's Unaccusativity Hypothesis (1978) is correct, intransitive verbs should belong to one of two classes: unergatives and unaccusatives and children gradually learn to expect either. However, James Essegbey demonstrates in chapter 10, ''Intransitive Verbs in Ewe and the Unaccusativity Hypothesis'' (pp 213-231), that in Ewe, a West African language, the intransitive verbs in fact belong to a single class marked by a common property, namely their inability to express a causal meaning. This situation poses the question of how children determine the argument structure of the verbs. Syntactic bootstrapping may help, according to Essegbey, but following the acquisition of the specifics of control in Ewe.

In chapter 11, ''He Died Old Dying to be Dead Right: Transitivity and Semantic Shifts of 'Die' in Ewe in Crosslinguistic Perspective'' (pp 231-255), Felix K. Ameka discusses material from Ewe related to the verb glossed as 'die'. He supposes that the learning of the Ewe verb would digress from that of 'die' verbs in other languages because of its specific semantic and syntactic properties: the Ewe verb can be used with two surface nouns and often undergoes semantic shifts imparting meanings such as 'remove the function'. It is the case that meanings associated with the two-place use are identical with the meanings of the one-place use and conversely, the two-place uses differ significantly among themselves. Ameka establishes that the decisive factor distinguishing one set of meanings from another is the feature 'animate'. Therefore, syntactic bootstrapping only works when children have acquired the specifics of the verb's arguments, especially animacy.

In chapter 12, ''Acquiring Telicity Crosslinguistically: On the Acquisition of Telicity Entailments Associated with Transitivity'' (pp 255-279), Angeliek van Hout reviews several experiments where children acquire the telicity of verbs, i.e. their specific property to denote a culmination of the verbal activity. In Slavic languages telicity is encoded in the predicate and acquired with greater ease and at a younger age, unlike the Germanic languages in the study - English, Dutch, and Finnish - where telicity is computed on the basis of the joint properties of the verb and object. 'Compositional telicity', as van Hout calls this type, poses more problems for children. Bybee's (1985) relevance principle explains why telicity is more relevant to verbal categories, which makes it easier in its predicate realizations.

Melissa Bowerman and William Croft, in their chapter entitled ''The Acquisiton of the English Causative Alternation'' (pp 279-309), study data from a longitudinal corpus of children's speech to establish how causative meanings are derived from a number a verbs in English. According to the nativist proposal (Baker 1979), inborn constraints prevent children from presuming that 'she died it' means 'she killed it'. Alternatively, Bowerman and Croft suggest that children discover which verbs allow causative transformation in several steps: firstly, they learn individual verbs; then they generalize across a wide range of forms, including causative ones; later, errors abate under the strength of evidence that high-frequency causatives exist; finally, semantic subclasses develop, which limits causative conversions to the permissible ones only. The actual material, however, offers little justification for either model, therefore the hypothesis of entrenchment remains the only plausible explanation, i.e. children learn which verbs allow causative use by repeatedly hearing them in intransitive frames until the association between verb and frame prevails in the child's own production.

Chapter 14, ''What Adverbs Have to do with Learning the Meaning of Verbs (pp 309- 331) is by Angelika Wittek. She investigates the acquisition of transitive verbs expressing a change of state in English and German. A series of experiments shows that for German-speaking children the end state of the verbal action does not present a critical meaning component. For her respondents this group of verbs is semantically similar to verbs denoting processes, which causes a problem for both the syntactic and semantic bootstrapping proposals. The use of an adverbial, however, serves as sufficient disambiguation. Therefore, Wittek proposes her own Adverbial Modification Cue hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, the use of adverbs meaning 'again' is a cue from which children learn that certain verbs entail an end state.

Finally, in chapter 15, ''Event Realization in Tamil'' (pp 331- 357), Eric Pedersen also studies end states but with reference to Tamil. In this language the semantics of the verbs allows speakers to say 'he broke the coconut but it did not break'. The strength of the entailments for verbs of this semantic type varies across languages and uses. Experiments lead Pedersen to believe that there may be some universal tendency to use change-of-state verbs for unrealized events, but the processes are specific for each language. An overarching systematicity to the adult patterns reveals a changing sensitivity in child usage in their particular language.

EVALUATION: The main merit of the book is that it puts together research by specialists in different areas aimed at solving the problem of how children learn to speak their mother tongue. Studies by linguists, neuroscientists, language acquisition specialists and psychologists can be expected to give a wide range of evidence in favor of or against the proposed hypotheses. Moreover, most of the authors are established names in their areas and continue their efforts from previous publication.

Secondly, the book overcomes the all-too-familiar Eurocentric perspective on languages by including African, Australian, and Asian languages in the main bulk of the presentations. It may be the case that those languages are spoken and studied by fewer people, but if claims are to be made for a Universal Grammar, then a wider range of languages needs to be considered.

A praiseworthy feature of the book - probably due to its cross-disciplinary nature - is the accessible style of the articles. With such narrowly specialized disciplines, one would have expected a concentration of terminology impenetrable to the non-specialist. However, all the research is presented in a reader-friendly way, without too much terminological complication and unfathomable references to ''must-be-familiar'' facts and quotations. Especially worth reading is the introduction to the book (pp. 1-29), where Melissa Bowerman and Penelope Brown introduce the subject of bootstrapping in plain and concise terms.

The chapters introduce a variety of research methods - from typological outlines, deep structure analyses to statistical performance tests. It feels, however, that when convincing results are needed, researchers are turning more and more often to corpora. Actual speech production gives ample material for speculation, appreciation, classifications and re-classifications, as can be seen from this volume.

As for building an argument that has the power to persuade, the book gives food for thought. On the whole, none of the language descriptions in the collection gives evidence which would formally endorse semantic or syntactic bootstrapping. At best, the authors conclude that syntactic and semantic bootstrapping work in tandem (because neither seems possible), or both are superceded by language-typology bootstrapping, the relevance principle, or entrenchment. Even worse, bootstrapping is shown to work provided that the mainstay noun/verb distinction is violated. Having read the book, an unprejudiced reader has reasons to presume that the plausible explanation for first language acquisition seems to be the entrenchment hypothesis (Braine 1971), because all the studies show that in the end children learn from repeated exposure to language phenomena. Moreover, the material strongly disproves a match between syntactic frames and semantic meanings across languages - this theme recurs in all the papers. Paradoxes of this kind call attention to the basic question to all research - what actually serves as proof for a theory and what can topple it?

Nevertheless, the book makes a wonderful read, its educational value is immense and the labor invested in it has been worth every minute. Bootstrapping helps understand various language phenomena, even when disproved.

Slobin, D. I. 2001. Form-function relations: How do children find out what they are. In M. Bowerman, and S.C. Levinson (eds) _Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development_, 406-449. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER Elena Tarasheva has publications discussing corpus linguistics and developing intercultural competence. She has been teaching English as a foreign language for more than 20 years to all sorts of audiences. Currently she is assistant professor at the New Bulgarian University in Sofia, teaching courses in Computational linguistics, English Phonetics and Phonology and Media English.